Helping your daughter deal with her first crush

When she reaches puberty, one of the most common emotional experiences she goes through is a passionate attachment to either a real or a fantasy individual.

Watch a group of young girls listening or talking about their favourite pop star and you can’t miss the fact that their feelings are very deeply involved. However, this doesn’t mean that every young person has crushes: Some escape them altogether and may worry that they don’t, just as those who have a crush worry that they are odd in some way.

There’s nothing wrong with a young person who get crushes, nor with one who doesn’t. Both are normal, they just respond to their emotional developmental changes differently.

Just a model...

The crush on a fantasy person may be the most irritating for parents. To see an otherwise sensible girl drooling over pictures of an actor or someone equally unattainable seems to be so silly (and it may even interfere with school work) that parents often become very annoyed indeed. But if they say anything at all out of place about the idol, they are accused of being cruel, heartless and all the rest of it.

Parents should understand why a child develops such a crush in order to be sympathetic. She is simply using the adored object as a model. He/she becomes her ideal of what a man/woman should be, and she uses him as a basis for her dreams of a future in which a deep relationship with a man will have a big place. It’s, in a way, a rehearsal for the emotional feelings she will eventually direct at real people.

She chooses her pop star or actor figure to fall in love with not because of his looks (though physical beauty helps!) or his talent but because of the very thing that makes him so ridiculous in adult eyes-his unavailability. It is as though the thirteen-year-old knows at a subconscious level she would be unable to handle any real boy, with his real emotions and sexual demands. She feels safe with this cardboard figure, he can be relied upon never to do anything that will upset her, or do anything that will alarm her.

Eventually the girl grows through her phase of needing this substitute love and learns to turn her emotions towards real boys. She may well retain much of her idealisation of her fantasy figure, but not with the same intensity. Don’t fall into the trap of sneering at a girl who retains such an attachment to a mild degree; plenty of adults do so too.

Get worried if...

The crush that causes most worry is that involving a real person of the same sex. The girl or boy who develops the crush may think she or he is homosexual but it’s not the case. This is an expression of the young person’s need to reach out towards an adult maturity. He or she needs to break away from the close tie to mother and father, and does so by means of a stepping-stone. The person who is the object of adoration is thus a substitute for the mother or father being left behind. At the same time, the love object becomes a model, just as is the fantasy crush object. There is a mixture of hero-worship and demand for support in the lover’s feelings.

Don’t panic...

The answer to this situation is to accept it. There is no need for either the loving or the beloved to be distressed, nor for the parents to panic. Only if a crush persists past the age of reaching towards maturity (for instance, after the age of 20) should it be regarded as a problem. If it continues at the same or increasing intensity for a long time, and becomes obsessive, then psychiatric help may be needed.